These last couple of issues have been strange, but not for the reasons you might think. Yes, there's some hallucinatory madness in the prior issue, and this one is dotted with flashbacks, but it's the actual context for the story that's strange. And not even really the context, but our exposure to it. Nightcrawler is attacked and made ill by Vermin, a particularly gruesome creature. We come in after the attack, during Kurt's delirium and, in today's issue, as he travels to Germany to uncover something hidden about his past. With Christine Palmer and Wolverine in tow. It's strange that we don't see the battle that pushed the hero on this kind of journey. It's a relatively common superhero trope - the hidden history, but we're often given the context of a battle in which the secret is teased to the hero. Here, instead, we skip the battle because Kurt comes upon the secret in the aftermath.
Let me put this to you, as it's just occurred to me:
The second book of Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene features a character known as the Palmer, a guide and companion to Guyon, the knight who emblematizes temperance. Kurt, here, is accompanied by a woman whose last name is Palmer and a man who isn't encased in metal, but who has metal inside rather than out. Are Aguirre-Sacasa and Robertson riffing on The Faerie Queene? Or am I an ex-Grad student who misses analyzing texts?
You Decide!
To be continued.
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